Three out of every four UK businesses wary of their email integrity

UK Businesses hope they will not be called before the court to share email evidence.

They are simply not confident of their email integrity. The news comes from an independent survey by market research company Vanson Bourne who surveyed IT decision makers in the financial services, manufacturing, retail, distribution, transport, utility and other markets in organisations across the UK. Respondents to the survey commissioned by Forensic & Compliance Systems, maker of the Cryoserver email archiving and compliance appliance, reported that nearly half (44%) could not prove whether their email had been changed or tampered. Over a third (35%) simply did not know whether any changes had occurred to their email. The results lead to the staggering conclusion that more than three of every four UK businesses might not be able to rely on email as legal evidence, for example in cases of unlawful dismissal or harassment.

The best prepared of the respondents (45%) were those working for financial services organisations and this comes as no surprise after the Enron and Morgan Stanley scandals and the subsequent additional regulation of these industries. At the other hand of the scale, a staggering 58% of the companies in the retail, distribution and transport verticals said that they could not prove whether an email had been tampered with.

This research has uncovered a worrying reality which many organisations still ignore; an even greater concern is that many of them do not understand the consequences of not having a tighter control over their emails in this day and age when communications of all types including business deals and recruitment plans are discussed electronically, said Ralph Harvey, CEO at FCS. Local Government organisations have already benefited from implementing stronger yet more transparent email archival strategies thanks to our Cryoserver range of appliances, and they are now safe in the knowledge that the positions of both the employer and the staff cannot be wrongly compromised.

With organisations in the utility and similar industries, nearly half (43%) of the respondents said that they did not know whether they could indeed rely on the integrity of their emails. This is likely to indicate that in fact they cannot prove that an email is original; measures need to be taken in order to ensure that emails can be used as proof in a legal dispute and hence in al likelihood dont know means that these organisations do not have a suitable strategy in place.

The Cryoserver range of forensic email archival appliances was built with compliance features from the outset and therefore is the ideal solution to help organisations address both the compliance and the storage management problems they face organisations today.

Cryoserver is a forensic email compliance solution meeting data protection and privacy requirements; it is a tamper-evident, sealed appliance and yet it is easy to implement and manage. To date, traditional email archiving solutions allowed organisations to store data but because of a lack of forensic capabilities, these emails could not be used in a court environment as admissible evidence. Cryoserver is the first product that successfully addresses this issue as it was built from the ground up to merge email archiving, compliance and forensic capabilities.

About FCS and Cryoserver

Forensic and Compliance Systems (FCS), is a privately-held company headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, with offices in London, Florida and New York and Colorado. The Cryoserver product line is a scalable, forensic email compliance archive that enables organisations to automatically and securely collect, store and index all email communication via a convenient, tamper-evident appliance. This enables eDiscovery and forensic analysis of an organisations entire email history that is ready for court submission if necessary. The entire range of solutions is available from a network of channel partners.

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